© 1997 Antelope Valley Press, Palmdale, California, USA (805) 273-2700
The Heaven's Gate mass suicide, O.J. Simpson and flooding in Northern California topped the list of stories chosen by 21 AP members who cast ballots in year-end voting. Tabulations showed Heaven's Gate received 118 points, Simpson 116 points and the floods 102 points.
Heaven's Gate
Promising salvation on a "Level Beyond Human," a fired music professor convinced 38 followers to shed their earthly containers and join him aboard a spaceship trailing the Hale-Bopp comet. It was among the worst mass suicides in U.S. history.
Marshall Applewhite and his Heaven's Gate cultists were found dead March 26 in a rented Rancho Santa Fe mansion north of San Diego wearing their "Going Away Team" uniforms of dark clothes and Nike sneakers. Most had ingested lethal doses of barbiturates and vodka - mixed in pudding cups.
The computer-literate group - some moonlighted as Web page designers - left on the Internet a bizarre theology that included bits of Christianity, New Age and Star Trek. During national recruiting efforts over 20 years, Applewhite, a.k.a. "Do," and his late partner, Bonnie Lu Nettles Trusdale, warned of an imminent recycling of the Earth.
A San Diego County sheriff's videotape showed how deputies found their lifeless bodies: on bunk beds and tables with their faces covered in purple shrouds. Adding to the bizarre revelations, autopsies revealed that Applewhite and seven men in the group had been castrated.
O.J. Simpson
In February, a mostly white jury rejected a year-old decision made by a mostly black jury and found O.J. Simpson responsible for the 1994 stabbing deaths of ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald Goldman. The civil jury then heaped $33.5 million in damages on the debt-ridden Hall of Fame football star.
In 1996, Simpson was acquitted of murder charges in a nationally televised, highly explosive trial where testimony often turned to race, revenge and police incompetence. In the end, jurors said their verdict turned on a police detective's lies and a faulty glove experiment by the prosecution. Simpson did not testify in the criminal trial, but he took the stand for four days during the nontelevised wrongful death trial.
Several civil jurors said it was Simpson's own words that convinced them he was the killer.
After the civil verdicts, Simpson was evicted from his Rockingham estate and moved with his children to a Pacific Palisades home he leases for $6,000 a month.
Simpson, who turned 50 in July, lives off of an untouchable football pension fund. Court battles over payment of the judgment are expected to continue for years.
Widespread flooding
Disaster struck early in the year when a series of storms battered Northern California and Nevada, causing widespread flooding that forced thousands of people to flee their homes. Half a dozen people died. Damage reached nearly $2 billion.
Television captured many of the floods' life-and-death moments.
The flooding started New Year's Day as the Russian River spilled its banks, inundating the wine country town of Guerneville. The worst flooding in decades ravaged Reno, Nev., and the town of Truckee when the Truckee River overflowed.
Hundreds of vacationers were trapped at Yosemite National Park when the Merced River flooded. The park, which sustained $178 million in damage, was closed for more than two months.
And in the Central Valley, residents were evacuated after a levee broke along the San Joaquin River. Helicopters had to rescue some residents who climbed on rooftops to escape the water. Breaks also occurred on the Tuolumne, Mokelumne and Cosumnes rivers.
Twenty-five of California's 58 counties were declared disaster areas.
Rounding out the top-10 stories of the year:
4. PROPOSITION 209: Courts uphold controversial Proposition 209 ban on racial and gender preferences for government contracts, jobs and college admissions.
5. BANK SHOOTOUT: Two bank robbers dressed in full body armor storm and rob a Bank of America in North Hollywood. During a fierce, nationally televised shootout with police, they are killed and 16 officers and civilians are injured.
6. EL NINO: The state braces for El Nino, a giant mass of warmer-than-usual water in the equatorial Pacific, expected to cause heavy storms this winter.
7. MARS PATHFINDER: Mars Pathfinder bounces onto the red planet on July 4 and begins beaming back vivid pictures and information and turning the $266 million mission into one of the space program's most triumphant journeys. Pathfinder also became the biggest draw in Internet history.
8. COSBY SON: Bill Cosby's 27-year-old son, Ennis, is killed while changing a flat tire on his father's Mercedes-Benz on Mulholland Drive. An 18-year-old is arrested nearly two months later after being implicated by an acquaintance. Trial for Mikail Markhasev is scheduled for February.
9. WELFARE REFORM: California imposes strict new limits on welfare to implement federal reforms.
10. UNABOMBER: Reclusive former UC math instructor Theodore Kaczynski goes on trial for 17year string of bombings known as the Unabomber case.